Agentic automation: UiPath’s AI-driven decision-making – SiliconANGLE

Based on the urge for practitioners to focus on more complex, creative and strategic roles, the demand for agentic automation is growing because it drives efficiency, reduces costs, enhances precision and opens up new opportunities.

As a result, UiPath Inc. is in high gear to deliver the agentic automation vision because it triggers precision, consistency, competitiveness, innovation and enhanced decision making, according to Taqi Jaffri (pictured, right), senior director of product management at UiPath.

“Here we are unveiling this vision of agentic automation,” Jaffri stated. “One of the premier things is the Agent Builder, how RPA developers can build their own agents and deploy them. Agents are nothing without the tools because to me, an agent needs to have agency, which means it needs to act more than just advise you with some text. It actually needs to take action, and in order to take action, we believe the best way to do that is with robots.”

Jaffri and Ed Challis (left), head of AI strategy at UiPath, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante and co-host Rebecca Knight at UiPath Forward 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed UiPath’s agentic automation roadmap of enhancing human decision-making processes through autonomy. (* Disclosure below.)

Unravelling UiPath’s agentic automation vision

Based on UiPath’s quest to supercharge productivity using artificial intelligence and automation, the company is in high gear to deliver its agentic and robotic vision. As a result, agentic automation is considered a game-changer because it introduces a higher level of autonomy and decision-making capabilities into automated systems, Challis pointed out. 

“Core screening is definitely a technology which can supercharge the entire digital estate of a business,” he stated. “I would say that automation is a necessary prerequisite. Agentic without automation is like a plane without a pilot or a body without a brain. Without taking actions, without causing changes, you are ultimately just an advisor. You can provide useful text, but you’re not actually doing anything that moves the needle. Automation closes the gap for AI and is a really critical component.” 

The distinction between bots and agents in terms of defined actions and objectives is of the essence. This is because with a bot, it cannot only be told what to do, but also how to undertake a specific task, which is not the case with an agent since it comes up with the plan dynamically, according to Challis. 

“The actions a bot takes is completely defined by the control flow that the developer creates,” he explained. “There’s logic and a predefined set of procedures which define the flow. An agent is defined by an objective, a goal and then it has tools at its disposal, a memory at its disposal to try and achieve that goal. It does so in a recursive way. It will maybe get some information, read that information, decide what next step to take and iteratively do that until it thinks it’s achieved its goal.”

Since robotic process automation is a prerequisite to successful agentic systems, UiPath AI Trust Layer fits into the picture since it triggers model governance, performance monitoring, transparency, as well as bias detection and mitigation, according to Jaffri. 

“If you actually want your agent to take action on your behalf, you need to give it these tools,” he explained. “We believe these robotic automations that UiPath has spent years building are the best kind of tools. I think you can have an agent do secure things through a robot so the robot can have your credentials and all these things, it can be governed. The way I think about the trust layer is it’s the sandbox to both of them. We have these gen AI activities and things like that all go through the trust layer.” 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of UiPath Forward 2024: 

(* Disclosure: UiPath Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither UiPath nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE